How TV concocted a recipe for success

As a new drama explores the life of the first celebrity chef, Fanny Cradock, Stephen Pile wonders why generation after generation is happy to watch others do dinner, but won't get stuck in themselves

It is 50 years since Fanny Cradock amazed the nation with her banana candles, not to mention her green mashed potatoes, but today her name still reverberates in our island culture. Why?

Next week, BBC4 brings the answer in Fear of Fanny, a drama devoted to the life, work and monstrous behaviour of this woman, who was the first and greatest TV celebrity chef.

There have always been cooks on television. The very first, in 1936, was Moira Meighn, author of a guide to Primus stove cooking entitled The Magic Ring for the Needy and Greedy. A year later, the restaurateur Marcel Boulestin launched the first ever TV cookery series, but the Second World War put a stop to all that.

Relaunching the genre, Philip Harbin had to use his own post-war rations to make his television programmes, while Marguerite Patten became the only person before or since to show us the versatility of Spam. But these good people were all instructors of whose personality little was known.

It was Fanny in the late Fifties who changed everything, dolled up in a ballgown, stuffing a chicken while bedecked in jewellery, haughtily crushing her terrified assistants with a shrill put-down and, above all, famously dominating her submissive husband, Johnnie, who poured the drinks and did what he was told.

It was the theatricality that mattered. This was showbiz. For the first time, personality was more important than recipes, and so the modern celebrity chef was born.

There are many reasons why these TV chefs are crucially important to British life but none of them has anything to do with catering. After all those chefs and all those programmes and all that sourcing of fresh ingredients, the fact is that we spent £1.6 billion on cook-chill food in Britain last year and ate nearly half the pre-prepared meals in the whole of Europe.

It is true that when people come to dinner we do occasionally ponce around in the kitchen doing a Jamie or a Nigella dish, but nobody seriously claims that, in half a century, these celebrity chefs have taught anyone how to cook.

As late as 1998, Delia Smith thought it might be a good idea to show the British how to boil an egg. Last year, in his French Odyssey series, Rick Stein compared the exquisite food in French transport cafés with its fry-up British equivalent. He found exactly the same depressing gap in food sophistication as Elizabeth David had in 1950. Even now, British mothers are pushing pies through school railings so that the fruit of their loins do not have to eat Jamie Oliver's swanky low-fat muck.

Can you name a single recipe by Fanny Cradock (apart from banana candles, obviously) – or Gary Rhodes, come to that? Of course not. This is not about cookery.

When the UKTV Food channel was set up, its founder, Nick Thorogood, was absolutely clear: "We were dealing with vicarious food porn." Make no mistake, watching it is a substitute for doing it.

My wife, for example, is an enthusiastic and skilful cook, but she never watches these programmes, whereas I, who am not even allowed in our kitchen, am never happier than when settling down with a tub of Pot Noodles and a box of Pringles to watch a TV chef prepare ravioli of lobster and langoustine poached in a shellfish bisque and served on a bed of crushed peas.

Why, exactly? First, it is always a great pleasure watching somebody else doing all the work. Second, there is no mess to clear up afterwards and no shopping beforehand. Third, the whole thing is anthropological. Traditionally we have prepared food in groups. In the Mediterranean, you can still see widows pounding pizza dough en masse. TV cookery programmes satisfy the isolated viewer's deep atavistic yearning for the communal.

Fourth, as Leanne Downing, an Australian academic, said in a recent lecture to the Melbourne Festival of Food and Wine, while Delia Smith represents an older educational tradition of Patten and Harbin, the true showbiz celebrity chef "teaches us to experience. They remind us how to taste and smell and touch food. I think what actually happens is that you decide cooking is something you would like to do, but the immediate decision is to order a takeaway."

Fifth, TV chefs are cultural signposts. They tell us who the British are and who we want to be. Fanny Cradock addressed the aspirations of the post-war young middle-class housewife who realised that food displayed rising status. Graham Kerr, the "Galloping Gourmet", touched a chord in the do-your-own-thing late Sixties, transforming the cookery show into pure entertainment. He was a wine-swilling, playboy cook who jumped over chairs, sang impromptu songs about love between chicken breasts and peppers, and once cooked in a suit of armour.

On a good day he would set fire to things. He also showed that it was OK for a guy to be domestic. At the end of each programme he invited a squealing Hausfrau from the audience to taste a gourmet dish that was rich and coronary-inducing.

After a bad car accident, Kerr disappeared from our screens. When he returned several years later, he had found religion and a new passion for low-calorie "caring cuisine". The man who was once dubbed "the most dangerous person in Britain" by WeightWatchers is currently touring America, aged 72, with wife, Treena, in a 38ft mobile home with the word "Gratitude" embossed in teak on the back, lecturing all who will listen upon the perils of indulgence.

Reflecting the luxury decadence of the glam rock Seventies, the late Robert Carrier was all about unabashed sensuality. A god to the new foodies, he showed us that we could have the best of everything, until his cream-soaked extravaganzas affected his health and he too recanted.

Gary Rhodes was the Eighties incarnate (lean, hard-working, with a sleek, spiky image) and in a Nineties obsessed with sex, Nigella Lawson was an inevitable post-feminist backlash, pouting libidinously into the fridge.

Jamie Oliver is Blairite New Britain. Entrepreneurial but with a social conscience, cool but virtuous, informal but nannying, his dinner guests are funky friends who are doing very well without a classical education. Rick Stein was really about the Cornwall boom that has also seen the expansion of Newquay airport, while Gordon Ramsay embodies Angry Britain, and the Two Fat Ladies prefigured the obesity timebomb.

It is because their role is primarily iconic that we only ever have one chef of each type: a young one, a black one, a boozy one. It is therefore a matter of supreme national importance to ask who will be the next celebrity chef (this is like reading prophetic sheep's entrails in Ancient Rome).

"As consumer debts spiral, there will be a new TV chef," Nick Thorogood predicts. "Somewhere between Jamie and Delia, he will understand that we have got used to good ingredients, but will have to tighten our belts."

This is only a guess, but I predict a series on Scottish cookery with a dour, unsmiling, Calvinist chef, preferably from Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath, Gordon Brown's constituency, who pretends to like expensive food but really wants us to eat more porridge. Fanny has a lot to answer for.